P. S. Centenary

Like an elephant trying to curtsey, the . world's biggest school system last week coyly re-enacted its birth. New York City's Board of Education was 100 years old. To celebrate, it dressed its little girls in pinafores and pantalettes, its little boys in jackets and Buster Brown collars. They read McGuffey readers, wrote on slates, drank water from dippers. Bearded teachers brandished canes at boys in dunce caps. A gentleman impersonating an old-time school trustee drove up to P.S. 15, The Bronx, in a gig. The city's schoolchildren were so bored they didn't even giggle.

When the New York Legislature in 1842 created a board of 34 school commissioners, two from each of the city's 17 wards, to launch New York City's public-school system, there were 47,390 pupils and 115 free schools (previously conducted by a group of citizens called the Public School Society). Today, with 761 schools, 974,420 pupils, 34.393 teachers and an annual budget of some $150,000,000, greater than many a nation's total income, the system is one of the wonders of the world: >Its buildings range from one-room schoolhouses to skyscrapers, from wooden outhouses to $5,000,000 marble palaces. >It has high schools bigger than most universities (with nearly 10,000 enrollment) ; its elementary schools average more than 1,000 pupils apiece.

> It has special classes for feebleminded children and for geniuses, classes in hospitals and bedridden children's homes, a school for the deaf, special schools for bad boys and girls, the nation's only music and arts high school, and the biggest public aviation trades school in the U.S. ^ Its psychiatrists (headed by Dr. Caroline Zachry) keep tabs on some 3,500 problem children a year.

In spite of all these services, New York City parents are notoriously discontented with their schools, year by year have moved in greater numbers to the suburbs for the express purpose of escaping from a colossus too big for its own good.

New York's schools suffer not only from bigness but from 18 years of Tammany mismanagement. During the reign of Dr. George J. Ryan, longtime (1922-36) president of the Board of Education, there were complaints that school officials wasted millions on school sites, buildings, furniture, by overpayments to favorites. Promotion went by political favor; pupils were strictly regimented: they had to march lockstep; some principals went so far as to make their girls wear uniforms (bloomers and long black cotton stockings) to make them less tempting to boys.

Today, under a LaGuardia-appointed board headed by hustling young James Marshall, son of the late famed Lawyer-Philanthropist Louis Marshall, the school are growing smaller, doing better. But the school system is still too big for its breeches.

Kids & Teachers. New York City's school kids come from homes that speak 40 different languages. They live in some of the world's worst slums, have one of the world's highest juvenile delinquency rates. In Harlem and Brooklyn no man's lands, boys sometimes frighten their teach ers by pulling knives in classrooms. At least 5,000 of the city's schoolboys are chronic truants.

The city's teachers, the world's best-paid (a teacher's top: $4,500; superintendent's: $25,000), include some of the world's worst as well as some of the best.

As a group they average ten years older (44) than the national median, are protected by permanent tenure, tolerant principals (who seldom rate a teacher unsatisfactory) and court rulings that make it almost impossible to remove even outright crackpots. Their lobbyists, who have al ways got on well with legislators, are now fighting tooth & nail against the board's attempt to lower the retirement age from 70 to 65.

In 2042? Although the LaGuardia administration has kicked out the spoils system and instituted competitive tests even for big jobs, most of the city's teachers hate Mayor LaGuardia. Reason: he annually cuts the school budget to the bone, has eliminated thousands of jobs. Today there are 2,000 fewer teachers than two years ago; in the budget for the coming year LaGuardia proposes not only to leave vacancies unfilled but for the first time to dismiss some 475 permanent appointees. The Mayor's point: enrollment in the city's schools has dropped nearly 150,000 in the last six years (because of the falling birth rate). The teachers' retort: in the city's schools there are still more than 10,000 unmanageably big classes (40 pupils or more).

As it started its second century, New York City's school system was in the midst of an upheaval. Its elementary schools were being converted from stem to stern to Progressive Education, which had been tried (with hopeful results) in 70 schools. The 1942 Board of Education hoped that by 2042 the school system would no longer be famed merely as the world's biggest.

Nisei in Search of a College

U.S. colleges last week jiggled a hot potato: Could they welcome Japanese students, even though loyal to the U.S., to their campuses? The man who passed them this hot potato was University of California's President Robert Gordon Sproul. Sympathizing with his 300 Nisei (American-born Japanese) students, whom he had to evacuate, Dr. Sproul asked 32 inland colleges (all west of the Mississippi) to admit them. The University of Washington followed suit, but extended its request to universities east of the Mississippi.

Washington had better luck than California. Sixteen colleges and universities (among them Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio State, Iowa State, Oberlin) agreed to give haven to Washington's Nisei. Of the 32 queried by Dr. Sproul, 14 replied they were "interested" (the rest said No or were noncommittal). And when Dr. Sproul announced the names of the 14, the outcry from their States was so fierce that three (Idaho, Kansas, Arkansas A. & M.) quickly changed their minds.

New Head at B. & N.

Private school headmasters usually hang on until a ripe o'l age, but Browne & Nichols (Cambridge, Mass.) lost one last week not on account of his old age but on account of his youth. The Army claimed Browne & Nichols' Headmaster Geoffrey Whitney Lewis. Undaunted, the school elected in his place another youngster: 36-year-old Assistant Professor Warren Seyfert of Harvard, which is just next door. A teacher in Harvard's Graduate School of Education, Seyfert is rated one of the faculty's ablest men. He believes that New England preparatory schools are still too hidebound and classical, plans to teach his boys at Browne & Nichols about combustion engines, photography, modern geography, aviation.

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